European Airliners Association Ranking

This is just another topic that in the end covers another downside of the Portuguese society.

A few days ago I was reading a newspaper on the internet when one of the news captured my eye. The title was: “TAP is the European airliner that gets more often delayed and that looses more luggages” (literal translation from Portuguese). Was that fact supposed to surprise me!? (I’m being ironic of course). All the flights that I did with TAP none have left at the right time, though sometimes they did arrive almost on time. How is that possible?! They fly at a higher speed, but at the expenses of a lower efficiency of fuel. So, in the end the company is losing something with that.

Then I continue reading the article and it says that the Association of European Airliners made a study to analyze some aspects of the European Airliners (the study includes 26 airliners). The conclusions of that study consist of tables that show the percentage of flights that depart on time and flights that arrive on time. TAP is on the end of those tables with 59,5% of arrivals on time and 62,5% departures on time. Hmmm… this fact kind of contradicts what I’ve said before because it states that the number of flights on time on arrivals is lower than on departures… but maybe not because the universe (number of flights) that I know is very small compared with the total amount of flights of TAP. Perhaps the captains of the flights that I did preferred to arrive on time and spend more fuel. Who knows?

On this study the Luxembourgish “Luxair” is the top company with less delays followed by KLM (the company in which I flew last time). I think that I should try to choose that company more often because not only I liked a lot the trip like also the studies confirm that the company is really good. Then I think… Portugal is integrating many European directives, laws and rules and when people in Portugal complain about something wrong in Portugal there is always someone pointing to the examples in Europe and that we should do the same. Well, this could be a matter where TAP could look to their competitors on Europe in order to improve its services, don’t you think?...

Well, the study also refers another point, the percentage of loss luggage. Also in this field TAP is in the last place of the table with almost 28 luggages lost per 1000 passengers. What else can I say? It’s a shame, is what it is. Unfortunately here the examples come from countries outside the Schengen space, with “Air Malta” and “Turkish Airlines” on the top. This makes sense since they need to have tighter security measures resulting from having “closed” borders.

This is a topic in my field, that’s why I decided to bring it up. Nevertheless, it illustrates how the Portuguese society is. See you…

Politicians…

A week ago, more or less, I received an e-mail with a link to a video on “YouTube” that showed a recent reaction of a known Portuguese politician. Well, the video was about Santana Lopes, a politician from the right wing that is known for his night life and appearances in tabloid magazines. He was president of a soccer club, he was mayor of the Portuguese city “Figueira da Foz” and he was also Prime-minister of Portugal for some months. He was demitted from Prime-minister by the President of the Republic because of the way he was conducting the Government and leading the country (Portugal). From all that I’ve said you can now imagine what kind of person he is and his ideals and principles.

The content of the video showed that he was giving an interview to talk about what was happening in the party that he is member and then the journalist that was conducting the interview interrupted him to give special news. Well, the news was the arrival of the Portuguese coach José Mourinho and saying that he just wanted that the journalists left him alone. This news took more or less three minutes.

When the broadcast returned to the main studio, Santana Lopes expressed his thoughts about what happened. He said that it was a shame that a television preferred to interrupt an interview where political problems were being discussed to film a soccer coach. He also decided to end the interview, and he did it in a calm but decided way. I think his reaction was correct and that make him be a little more credible to me.

However, this was a feeling that lasted only some days because I heard that his reaction on that day was not in accordance with his reactions in the past. Apparently, he was the cause for interruptions in the television’s broadcast in the past, when he was for example president of a soccer club and he was happy to be the center of the attentions at those times. Well, he can’t blame now for the attitude of the television since he agreed with that attitude in the past.

And now he’s being criticized because of his reaction on that day because that put him on the center of stage like he likes and liked in the past. He should have been coherent with his past…


PS: As a comment for my post of the “Portuguese Airshow 2007”, one of these days a friend of mine João, who is starting the course to become a pilot and thus is a reliable source, told me that the two pilots on the aircraft that supposedly almost let one of the wings of an Airbus A310 touched the ground were two very experienced pilots from TAP that spent many hours in a flight simulator practicing for that maneuver. In other words, this answer the post: it was planned and therefore an “awesome maneuver”.

PS2: Here's the video on "YouTube" that I watched.